Our approach to representing the discipline derives from what computer and information scientists call “formal ontology.” However, we will avoid using this term because some researchers sensitive to Husserl’s distinction between “formal ontology” and “material ontology” prefer to reserve the former for a stricter kind of ontology than is satisfied by some aspects of our approach (Poli 1995; and see 6.2 below). Instead, we prefer to refer to our representation as a “computational ontology” and “dynamic ontology.”